Team Talk is Music Ally’s interview series, where our marketing experts speak to music industry teams about their latest work, best practices, and smart strategies. You can find the archive here.
Mark Cantwell arrived as Partnerships and Marketing Director at music licensing company Lickd with a background in games publishing. He spoke to Music Ally’s Amy Lilley about how he’s helping drive the company’s games efforts, the convergence of games and music and the opportunities in this space, how part of a generation of young people may only experience music in gaming, and how gamers and content creators are licensing commercial music.
Amy Lilley: Tell us about your transition from games publishing to music licensing – and how these experiences have helped your role at Lickd?
Mark Cantwell: I’ve always loved music first and foremost – and I love video games as well, and I chose video games as I was wary about making my hobby my job. After 15 years of working for online media owners and games publishers on titles like WWE, UFC, FIFA, which is now EAFC, I also collaborated on the launch of Fortnite and got some great experience and a great friends from that.
Ultimately what you’re trying to create is the “Value Triangle” (statement was coined by Rich Keith at Fourth Floor) where the creator and the client and the consumer all win. That’s when you’ve done your job. We’re trying to engineer a situation where creators get to access to the best music, where labels and artists have been paid appropriately for the music, and where the consumers are watching that content, and they’re getting the best music.
The most important part from me is to make sure that you believe in the product. It’s really hard to market a thing you don’t believe in.
“Right now there’s a weird wall where you can’t access some music unless you can afford to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds”
Amy Lilley: As someone who loves both gaming and music, how do you envision the future of music and gaming and digital content creation – and what goals do you have for Lickd within the gaming industry?
Mark Cantwell: The next generation of music fans are already experiencing music in a multitude of different ways and there’s every chance that people have been born who are never going to experience music anywhere else other than in Fortnite or in some form of multiverse or Roblox. That’s where music’s moving and at the industry has to realise that.
We’ve got a few projects in the metaverse and they’re an extension of what we’re already doing – to make sure that everyone has access to the best music and that everyone is paid fairly.
Right now there’s a weird wall where you can’t access some music unless you can afford to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds and have a big team to do that – and certainly coming from outside the music industry, licensing music is far more difficult than I ever thought. We are trying to democratise the access to mainstream music for all creators.
Content creators are now dominant and are becoming the establishment however they are not in some cases afforded the respect they are due. Some kids are never going to experience making music anywhere except [in games and virtual experiences] – we so need to see how we can help make that innovation happen and help more people access more music to make better products.
Amy Lilley: What is the biggest challenge with putting music into gaming and then what are the opportunities you’re seeing?
Mark Cantwell: The biggest challenge in this is realising the scale of the opportunity. There are kids born now that will never ever use Spotify or YouTube Music or any streaming service – because they experience music through Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite and mobile games that they’re playing. And it’s not an adjunct – there’s a new place to consume content being born and the industry has to get on board with that pretty quickly. It’s exciting stuff and that’s where the opportunities converge.
Amy Lilley: Music licensing is competitive. There’s a lot of companies trying to fill this space and trying to disrupt, so how does Lickd differentiate itself from other music licensing platforms – and what other opportunities exist in the future?
Mark Cantwell: It’s just choice. We’ve got 15 times more tracks than any other platform out there. If you’re looking for mainstream music, you’re not going to find it anywhere else. It never surprises me how much content creators love using Coldplay in the videos and it seems to be the number one streamed artist time after time! I think something like only 4% of our library has ever been licensed – so that means there’s an opportunity for creators to use new and undiscovered tracks.
Right now we’re building a platform for brands to easily license music and it’s probably the next big thing will be smaller brands using music within different platforms – ones that don’t have Content ID like YouTube does. So we’re trying to work in that space and make sure that smaller brands can use music in their content without needing to have the massive FMCG budgets to do it.
